THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SIN
It remains now to pass in review the doctrines which would be affected by the social gospel and which ought to give more adequate expression to it. On some of the more speculative doctrines the social gospel has no contribution to make. Its interests lie on earth, within the social relations of the life that now is. It is concerned with the eradication of sin and the fulfilment of the mission of redemption. The sections of theology which ought to express it effectively, therefore, are the doctrines of sin and redemption.
The Christian consciousness of sin is the basis of all doctrines about sin. A serious and humble sense of sinfulness is part of a religious view of life. Our consciousness of sin deepens as our moral insight matures and becomes religious. When we think on the level of law or public opinion, we speak of crime, vice, bad habits, or defective character. When our mind is in the attitude of religion, we pray: " Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me." When a man is within the presence and consciousness of God, he sees himself and his past actions and present conditions in the most searching light and in eternal connections. To lack the consciousness of sin is a symptom of moral immaturity or of an effort to keep the shutters down and the light out. The most highly developed individuals, v^ho have the power of interpreting life for others, and who have the clearest realization of possible perfection and the keenest hunger for righteousness, also commonly have the most poignant sense of their own shortcomings.
By our very nature we are involved in tragedy. In childhood and youth we have imperious instincts and desires to drive us, and little knowledge to guide and control us. We commit acts of sensuality, cruelty, or dishonour, which nothing can wipe from our memory. A child is drawn into harmful habits which lay the foundation for later failings, and which may trip the man again when his powers begin to fail in later life. How many men and women have rushed with the starry eyes of hope into relations which brought them defilement of soul and the perversion of their most intimate life, but from which they could never again extricate themselves by any wrench. " Forgive us our trespasses. Lead us not into temptation." The weakness or the stubbornness of our will and the tempting situations of life combine to weave the tragic web of sin and failure of which we all make experience before we are through with our years.
Any religious tendency or school of theology must be tested by the question whether it does justice to the religious consciousness of sin. Now, one cause of distrust against the social gospel is that its exponents often fail to show an adequate appreciation of the power and guilt of sin. Its teachings seem to put the blame for wrongdoing on the environment, and instead of stiffening and awakening the sense of responsibility in the individual, it teaches him to unload it on society.
There is doubtless truth in this accusation. The emphasis on environment and on the contributory guilt of the community, does offer a chance to unload responsibility, and human nature is quick to seize the chance. But the old theology has had its equivalents for environment. Men unloaded on original sin, on the devil, and on the decrees of God. Adam began soon after the fall to shift the blame. This shiftiness seems to be one of the clearest and most universal effects of original sin.
Moreover, there is an unavoidable element of moral unsettlement whenever the religious valuation of sin is being reconsidered. Paul frequently and anxiously defended his gospel against the charge that his principle of liberty invited lawlessness, and that under it a man might even sin the more in order to give grace the greater chance. We know what the Hebrew prophets thought of the sacrificial cult and moral righteousness, but we are not informed about the unsettling effect which their teaching may have had. If we could raise up some devout priest of the age of Amos or Isaiah to give us his judgment on the theology of the prophets, he would probably assure us that these men doubtless meant well, but that they had no adequate sense of sin; they belittled the sacrifices instituted by Moses; but sacrificing, as all men knew, was the true expression and gauge of repentance.
In the early years of the Reformation, Catholic observers noted a distressing looseness in the treatment of sin. Men no longer searched their consciences in the confessional; they performed no works of j)enance to render satisfaction to God and to prove their contrition; they no longer used the ascetic means of holiness to'subdue their flesh and to gain victory over the powers of darkness. Luther had taught them that God required nothing but faith, and that all accounts could be squared by agreeing to call them square. By any standard of measurement known to Catholics, the pro founder consciousness of sin was with the old theology and its practical applications. In point of fact, the Reformation did upset the old means of moral control and did create widespread demoralization. But in time, Geneva, Holland, or Scotland showed a deeper consciousness of sin than Rome or Paris. The sense of sin found new outlets.
The delinquencies of a new movement are keenly observed because they are new; the shortcomings of an old system are part of the accepted scheme of life. If the exponents of the old theology have taught humanity an adequate consciousness of sin, how is it that they themselves have been blind and dumb on the master iniquities of human history? During all the ages while they were the theological keepers of the conscience of Christendom, the peasants in the country and the working class in the cities were being sucked dry by the parasitic classes of society, and war was damning poor humanity. Yet what traces are there in traditional theology that the minds of old-line theologians were awake to these magnificent manifestations of the wickedness of the human heart? How is it that only in the modern era, since the moral insight of mankind has to some extent escaped from the tuition of the old theology, has a world-wide social movement arisen to put a stop to the exploitation of the poor, and that only in the last three years has war been realized as the supreme moral evil? One of the culminating accusations of Jesus against the theological teachers of his time was that they strained at gnats and swallowed camels, judiciously laying the emphasis on the minor sins and keeping silence on the profitable major wrongs. It is possible to hold the orthodox doctrine on the devil and not recognize him when we meet him in a real estate office or at the stock exchange.
A health officer of Toronto told me a story which illustrates the consciousness of sin created by the old religious teaching. If milk is found too dirty, the cans are emptied and marked with large red labels. This hits the farmer where he lives. He may not care about the health of Toronto, but he does care for the good opinion of his own neighbourhood, and when he drives to the station and finds his friends chuckling over the red labels on his cans, it acts as a moral irritant. One day a Mennonite farmer found his cans labeled and he swore a worldly oath. The Mennonites are a devout people who take the teachings of Christ seriously and refuse to swear, even in lawcourts. This man was brought before his church and excluded. But, mark well, not for introducing cow-dung into the intestines of babies, but for expressing his belief in the damnation of the wicked in a non-theological way. When his church will hereafter have fully digested the social gospel, it may treat the case this way: " Our brother was angry and used the name of God profanely in his anger; we urge him to settle this alone with God. But he has also defiled the milk supply by unclean methods. Having the life and health of young children in his keeping, he has failed in his trust. Voted, that he be excluded until he has proved his lasting repentance.'* The result would be the same, but the sense of sin would do its work more intelligently.
In his " Appeal to the Christian Nobility," Luther said that in consequence of the many fast days and the insistence of the priests on their observance, the people had come to a point where they regarded it as a greater sin to eat butter on a fast day than to lie, swear, or commit fornicajion. An eminent minister in New York enumerated as the chief marks of a Christian that he attends church, reads the Bible, and contributes to the support of public worship. A less eminent minister in the same place mentioned as the four sins from which a Christian must abstain, drinking, dancing, card playing, and going to the movies. And this in New York where the capitalistic system of the nation comes to a head!
It may well be that with some individuals there is a loss of seriousness in the sense of sin as a result of the social gospel. But on the whole the result consists chiefly in shifting the emphasis and assigning a new valuation to different classes of sins. Attention is concentrated on questions of public morality, on wrongs done by whole classes or professions of men, on sins which enervate and submerge entire mill towns or agricultural states. These sins have been side-stepped by the old theology. We now have to make up for a fatal failure in past teaching.
We feel a deep consciousness of sin when we realize that we have wasted our years, dissipated our energies, left our opportunities unused, frustrated the grace of
God, and dwarfed and shamed the personahty which God intended when he called us into life. It is a similar and even deeper misery to realize that our past life has hurt and blocked the Kingdom of God, the sum of all good, the essential aim of God himself. Our duty to the Kingdom of God is on a higher level than all other duties. To aid it is the supreme joy. To have failed it by our weakness, to have hampered it by our ignorance, to have resisted its prophets, to have contradicted its truths, to have denied it in time of danger, to have betrayed it for thirty pieces of silver, — this is the most poignant consciousness of sin. The social gospel opens our eyes to the ways in which religious men do all these things. It plunges us in a new baptism of repentance.
THE FALL OF MAN
We are familiar with the teachings of traditional theology on the first entrance of sin into the life of the race: the state of innocence of our first parents; the part played by Satan in tempting them; the motives and experiences of the fall; the apostasy of the entire race through the disobedience of its head; the transmission of depravity and death to all; the imputation of Adam's guilt to all his descendants; the ruin of the divine plan for humanity by the perversity of sin.
The motives of theology in elaborating so fully an event so remote were partly philosophical and partly religious.
The philosophical motive was the desire for a coherent explanation of our universe and its present bafifling m^ixture of good and evil. The story of the fall, as interpreted by theology, furnished an outline for a philosophical history of the race. It was the first act in a great racial tragedy which was to end with the final judgment. The fact that a mind like Milton's took the fall as the theme for a great epic, and that his poem was accepted as a poetic treatment of the highest realities, shows how the doctrine of the fall dominated common thought.
The religious motive in elaborating the doctrine of the fall was the desire to bring all men under conviction of sin and condemnation in order that all might realize their need of grace and salvation. There was no need to prove the guilt of any one individual when all were in a state of corruption. It was not a question of this act or that, but of the state of apostasy from which all acts proceeded and by which even our virtues are contaminated. The terribleness of sin became clear only by scanning the height from which man had fallen. He once had a pure consciousness of God; he now has a mind darkened by sin and unable to know God. He had a will set on holiness; he now has a will set on evil and rebellion. He had love of goodness, harmony of the higher and lower powers, freedom from suffering, power over nature, and the grace of God. He lost it all. Consequently he is unable to save himself. Only the grace of God can save him. We can see this religious motive at work in the great theologians of sin and grace, Paul, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. They abased man to glorify God's mercy. They took away all *' boasting." They shut all doors on the prisoner of sin except the door of grace in order to compel him to emerge through that.
It is important to realize that the story of the fall is incomparably more fundamental in later theology than it was in biblical thought. The conspicuous place given to Genesis in the arrangement of the Hebrew canon, itself concentrated the attention of later times on it. The story now embodied in Genesis iii was part of the Jahvist narrative, a document of Ephraimitic origin dating back to the ninth century B.C. The original purpose of the story was not to explain the origin of sin, but the origin of death and evil. There are scarcely any allusions to the story in the Old Testament. The prophets were deeply conscious of the sins of men, but they did not base their teachings on the doctrine of the fall. Not till we reach post-biblical Jewish theology is there any general interest in the story of Adam's fall. Even then the story of the fall of the angels in Genesis vi attracted more interest.
In the synoptic sayings of Jesus there is not even a reference to the fall of Adam. In the fourth gospel there is one allusion, (John viii, 44). Jesus, of course, had the clearest consciousness of the chasm between the will of God and the actual condition of mankind. The universality of sin was a matter of course with him; it was presupposed in all his teaching. But he was concerned only with those sources of sin which he saw in active work about him: first, the evil heart of man from which all evil words and actions proceed; second, the social stumbling blocks of temptation which make the weak to fall; and third, the power of the Kingdom of Evil. On the other hand the first origin of evil seems to have been so distant in his mind that it did not readily slip into any discussions of sin which are preserved to us. His interest was practical and not speculative, religious and ethical and not philosophical.
Not until we come to Paul do we find any full and serious use of the story of the fall in the Bible. He twice (Romans v and I Corinthians xv) set over against each other the carnal humanity descended from Adam and characterized by sin and mortality, and the spiritual humanity descended from Christ and characterized by holiness and eternal life. These passages belong to the theo- logical portions of Paul's writings and were eagerly seized by the patristic writers as congenial raw material for their work. ^
When once theology concentrated on the story it was expanded by exegetical inferences, by allegorical embellishments, and by typology, until it conveyed far more than it actually contained. It comes as a shock to realize, for instance, that the story in Genesis itself does not indicate that the writer understood the serpent to be Satan, or Satan to be speaking through the serpent. Moreover, we find so few traces of any belief in Satan in Hebrew thought before the Exile that it seems doubtful if contemporary readers would have understood him to be meant unless further indications made the reference clear.
Here, then, we have two different methods of treating the story of the fall. Theology has given it basic importance. It has built its entire scheme of thought on the doctrine of the fall. Jesus and the prophets paid little or no attention to it. They were able to see sin clearly and to fight it with the highest energy without depending on the doctrine of the fall for a footing. Only with Paul is the story clearly of religious importance, and even with him it is not as central as for instance the antagonism between spirit and flesh. It offered him a wide spiritual perspective and a means of glorifying Christ.
Two things seem to follow. First, that the traditional doctrine of the fall is the product of speculative interest mainly, and that the most energetic consciousness of sin can exist without drawing strength from this doctrine. Second, that if the substance of Scriptural thought, the constant and integral trend of biblical convictions, is the authoritative element in the Bible, the doctrine of the fall does not seem to have as great an authority as it has long exercised.
How does this affect the "special gospel? What doctrinal teaching on this point is able to give it the most effective backing?
The social gospel is above all things practical. It needs religious ideas which will release energy for heroic opposition against organized evil and for the building of a righteous social life. It would find entire satisfaction in the attitude of Jesus and the prophets who dealt with sin as a present force and did not find it necessary to indoctrinate men on its first origin. It would have no motive to be interested in a doctrine which diverts attention from the active factors of sin which can be influenced, and concentrates attention on a past event which no effort of ours can influence.
Theology has made the catastrophe of the fall so complete that any later addition to the inheritance of sin seems slight and negligible. What can be worse than a state of total depravity and active enmity against God and his will? ^ Consequently theology has had little to say about the contributions which our more recent fore- iThe Helvetic Confession, II, Chapter 8: "We understand original sin to be the native corruption of man which has passed from our first parents to us; through which, being sunk in depraved desires, averse to good, inclined to every evil, full of every wickedness, of contempt and hatred of God, we are unable to do or even to think any good whatever."
fathers have made to the sin and misery of mankind. The social gospel would rather reserve some blame for them, for their vices have afflicted us with syphilis, their graft and their wars have loaded us with public debts, and their piety has perpetuated despotic churches and unbelievable creeds. One of the greatest tasks in religious education reserved for the social gospel is to spread in society a sense of the solidarity of successive generations and a sense of responsibility for those who are to come after us and whom we are now outfitting with the fundamental conditions of existence. This is one of the sincerest and most durable means of spiritual restraint. It is hard to see how the thought of Adam and Eve can very directly influence young men and women who are to be the ancestors of new generations. In so far as the doctrine of the fall has made all later actions of negligible importance by contrast, it blocks the way for an important advance in the consciousness of sin.
The traditional doctrine of the fall has taught us to regard evil as a kind of unvarying racial endowment, which is active in every new life and which can be overcome only by the grace offered in the Gospel and ministered by the Church. It would strengthen the appeal of the social gospel if evil could be regarded instead as a variable factor in the life of humanity, which it is our duty to diminish for every young life and for every new generation.
These, it seems to me, are the points at which the social gospel impinges on the doctrine of the fall of man.
Of course evolutionary thought has radically changed the conceptions about the origin of the race for those whose thinking is done under the influence of evolutionary science. Such will take little interest in the discussion of this chapter. But there are many conservative minds who can not recast their thought in wholly new moulds; the story of the fall is a serious religious and intellectual burden to some of them. The more theology bases all its reasoning on the doctrine of the fall, the greater is the collapse and mental distress when a man comes to realize that the biblical story of the fall will not bear the tremendous weight which the theological system of the past has put upon it. For such the attitude suggested in this chapter seems to offer a way which is satisfying to both the religious and the scientific conscience. They can not be going far wrong if they take the attitude taken by the Hebrew prophets and by Jesus himself, concentrating their energies on the present and active sources of evil and leaving the question of the first origin of evil to God. On that basis it is possible to preach both an individualistic and a social gospel with full effectiveness.